This morning's Washington Post follows up on last week's critical stories and reveals that Vice President Cheney's office favors getting behind the Shi'ites and the Kurds at the expense of the Sunnis. The battle, then, is between Cheney and Hadley. The new story did not repeat what the same authors said last week--that the State Department was behind that option. (That always seemed awfully strange to me. Perhaps the source last week didn't want to show the Vice President's hand.) To back the Shi'ites without setting some pretty strict limits on their ambitions, I think, will be disastrous--but it sounds as if the Administration may indeed go that way.
See the much longer post on the Baker-Hamilton report, below.
Welcome to the middle east. What the US in general seem to forget is that the Middle East is made out of old City-states, where blood, money and clan-ties are much stronger motivators than religion. Religion is just one of several levels of the local powerstructure. The civil war in Iraq is more the result of internal powerpolitics under Saddam Hussein, who was almost atheistic Sunni, than it is a real religious schisma.
ReplyDeleteIts the same in Afghanistan: The Taliban-movement we supposedly are fighting are actually a loose band of Pashtuni tribes who have joined together to fight the infidels. Hekmatyar propably doesnt have a religious bone in his body, yet after the failed US assassination attempt he has no problem hanging out with Mullah Omar.